Reinvestments in dentistry and differences between western or central and eastern European countries

Abstract

This paper has focused on the willingness of owners to reinvest their profit back into a company. Research gaps in the investigation of financial issues in the healthcare industry are apparent in the literature. The aim of this paper is to estimate the differences in reinvestments between dentistry companies operating in western or central and eastern Europe (CEE). Annual Orbis data were obtained from financial reports from 3,711 western and 1,173 CEE companies. The generalized method of moments with panel data, currently modified by Kripfganz (2019), has been deployed as the main estimation technique. The estimated sample has been divided according to the return on assets into quartiles. The results clearly show that western owners rather reinvested their earnings back into their businesses, whereas CEE owners reinvest at a lower level. Furthermore, the willingness to reinvest, as well as the financial constraints related to that, can affect the quality of dentistry services.